Merry Christmas, everyone!!! Christmas is the time of the year that I most associate with Joes, for pretty obvious reasons. It was Christmas morning when my next door neighbor knocked on the door with news that he received the U.S.S. Flagg - - my heart sank with envy, but it was breathtaking (his dad and older brother had spent all night assembling it)... A few months later, when it was trashed, I always appreciated his sharing the memory of it whole.

Anyway, I picked Christmas to launch my first dio site, and since this is the only site where I am really active (and my favorite Joe site by far), this is the only place where I'm posting my link. I've been playing around with my camera and setups and posting the results here for over a year, but now I'm finally ready to dig into the hobby regularly after a couple of years of building my forces.

I hope you enjoy the stories and feel free to comment below. I plan to update regularly. Enjoy (LBC) customs of Cobra Mortal, De Aco, Invasor, Metal-Head, and Vance Wingfield in my first installment linked below.

Like Baron Ironblood, I've shed my skin of "Stalker" for the purposes of Joe Dio Stories know me as: COBRA CY!!!

http://www.cobracy.com

Interesting take on Viper training, can't wait to see more.

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OK, taking this point by point, cause a dio like this deserves the best critique I can give:

1. GREAT use of color. Each page is a thrill to look at – and looks very much like what Hasbro would have produced in dio-form in pictures. You get HIGH marks from me for in essence making new Hasbro quality dios.

2. Your references betray your influences, and I love it – "The Cobra Commander" – just seeing this terminology brings to mind the early comics – some of my favorite!

3. Good mix of Sunbow stuff – nice to see Sparks and General Flagg still alive! Love to see the references to the comics too "Iron Butt!"

4. Short page count, but eventful and fun, the perfect length and mix of action without being talky and boring. Great stuff!

5. Excellent use of Tomax and Xamot, emphasizing their acrobatic capabilities. I'm iffy on the Shadow Guard's involvement, but I'll reserve judgment thus far based on the early awesomeness.

6. Sets seem top notch without being distracting or poorly lit.

7. Pages are easy to follow, and fonts are top-notch – an enjoyable and easy read on the eyes.

Overall, this is the sort of dio I thirst for reading – decent story, lots of action, tons of Blueshirts, Tomax and Xamot portrayed well (Sunbow Style). I'm looking forward to this one – while I follow some of Hawk's stuff and others, I'm not a huge fan for private universes. Something tells me there's enough Sunbow in yours to keep me very entertained, without having to catch up on 3-4 years of dios and private universe fic.

Please, please keep it up – this is the most promising dio I've seen since Hammerfel, and he fell off the face of the earth.

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Wow, thanks Macrossmaster!

And thanks to everyone on this site for posting their dios and customs over the years, letting me lurk, occasionally comment and post, and of course, enjoy...

I never would have gotten back into Joes and done something like this (even though I've been itching to for years) without having you all's work to learn from and be inspired by.

Cheers!

Great dio story! Very impressive for your first time out!

I loved the panel layout, and the story.

Sneak Peek and Low-light's banter in the beginning is classic and funny.

I did have a hard time reading some of the text due to the dithering that happened when the images were scaled down by the HTML. Compare the raw image: http://www.cobracy.com/images/page_2.jpg
vs the scaled down image: http://www.cobracy.com/CAMP_COBRA_pg_1.html

On my screen, at least, the text gets very dithered and difficult to read. Small detail, but I thought it worth mentioning.

Great work!

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Hey, congrats on crawling back onto the earth there Hammerfel. Gonna see any more dio sweetness from you? When you did that first one it was like dropping an atomic bomb, no one had seen anything like it. Imagine what you could do with 25th Joes...

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Awesome, great job making all those troops look good, I know how hard that can be. I could see Viper training being just like this and I loved when the .

Looking forward to more.

Thanks

I noticed that, too - but it seemed like refreshing the page corrected it... Not sure if that's a real fix, though - I'll take any suggestions on how to fix (this is my first website attempt, so I was kind of fumbling through it).

Thanks, Macrossmaster. I get a lot of motivation from great comments like that.

It actually IS due to the 25th Joes that I am back. I'm even in the process of cleaning out [urlhttp://www.joedios.com/dioramas/showimage.php?i=10457&c=10]my Joe room[/url].

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Very cool, especially for a first outing.

And it definitely does have that classic cartoon feel.

Keep up the great work.